He agreed with enthusiasm, and the price he came back with—and swore he would keep to—made me fairly sure he planned on giving work to some people of questionable citizenship. I decided not to worry about it. Domingo had a contractor’s license. We’d decided that he could handle hiring and firing without involving me if I hired him in that capacity for the painting, rather than having him direct the work in his role as caretaker.
I had no doubt he’d do a good job. I had the evidence all around me as proof.
Over the past couple of days we had worked our way around the uncomfortable awareness of each other that had followed our discussion of our mutual lack of marital partners. We met many mornings for coffee and some sort of breakfast cake, usually sitting out in the walled confines of the back garden. Domingo came and went there freely now, tending his garden. When he brought me roses or cut flowers there was nothing romantic about it, just the lovely end result of pruning.
I stopped working on the downstairs long enough to transform one of the front bedrooms on the second floor into a room for myself. It was across the landing from the rooms that had been my mother’s and had ostensibly been the best guest room. However, the only overnight guests I recalled had been my mother’s lovers. As I had my doubts that any of them had actually spent a night in the spacious chamber, I felt quite comfortable taking it over for myself.
The furniture was in good condition, all but the mattress of the queen-sized bed, in which the foam padding and satin fabric had dried and deteriorated so that lying on the bed felt like lying on old crackers. I didn’t think I could find a buyer for the mattress even on the Internet, so I junked it and bought myself a nice new one.
I found linens to fit in the cedar closet, gave them a good laundering to get rid of the smell of mothballs. Up in the attic, I found a couple of big steamer trunks that had been used to store quilts and other heavy bedding. Las Vegas nights could grow chilly, even in summer, and I picked out a pretty star pattern patchwork quilt done in a riot of yellows and greens with touches of pale pink. I had no memory of ever seeing it before, and that pleased me.
The furniture in the room was heavy cherry, a good wood that responded well to oil soap and polish. The rugs rolled against the wall were simply patterned orientals in neutral tans, blues, and pale golds, perfect for a guest room. I aired and vacuumed them, and found their muted colors glowed.
I was pleased with this place I’d made for myself, but in the process of setting it up, in going up and down, up and down from the attic searching for this accessory or that, I had felt a puzzle growing in my mind.
There, in a side wing, toward the back of the house where they overlooked the gardens, were my own rooms. Mother’s had been on the front left (as you faced the street) of the second floor. These rooms I still had not entered, as I had not entered the front parlor or the library. However, by now I was sure I had opened every other door and at least peeked inside. I found more spare bedrooms, an office that clearly had not been used for even longer than the rest of the house, even an infirmary of sorts.
One of the towers proved to have been furnished as a sitting room, pleasantly situated so that you seemed to be nesting among the tossing boughs of the elms. Another showed traces of having been used as an artist’s studio, though, as with that second office, my impression was that it had been a long time since it had been so used. There was a music room, the piano horribly out of tune, over half the strings on the impressive harp broken. There were numerous instruments stored in cabinets or closets: violins and violas in flaking leather cases, two matching silver flutes and piccolos, a brass trumpet, a French horn, and even a pair of maracas painted with parrots.
In short, I found everything and more than that for which I was searching. Where were the servants’ quarters? Where had the silent women slept? I remembered them as omnipresent, whether putting me to bed at night or bringing me my breakfast in the morning. True, I had never known them well. Mother had discouraged familiarity with the servants, even with the one who was intended to serve as my tutor.
Did they go home at night? It seemed that I should have had some memory of this, some sense of the guard being changed, but all I remembered was them always being there, answering the ring of the bell or my mother’s imperious summons.
I’d hoped to find something of theirs left behind in what must have been a fairly hasty evacuation. A book with a name written on the flyleaf, a notebook, a letter case—something that would give me an idea where I might find one or more of these women. They might have an idea what had happened to my mother, an idea they might be willing to share with her daughter.
Mother might have commanded them to silence, and I remembered Mother well enough to know that her commands would have been respected even after—maybe even especially after—she had apparently disappeared, but surely they would break that silence now, over forty years later, when the interrogator was Colette’s own daughter.
But I found no trace of them, not even in the kitchen, pantries, and other workrooms that I remembered being their domain. There were no scribbled notes in recipe books, no partial grocery lists. They had cleared away every trace of themselves, perhaps while they settled the house beneath its dust sheets, preparing it for its long nap.
I had one name, Teresa Sanchez, a name Aunt May had found in the newspaper articles about my mother’s disappearance. I decided to ask Domingo about it, and did so one morning over coffee and a particularly good pecan roll his sister, Evelina, mother of Enrico, had sent over.
We were in the back garden, and Domingo was already dressed for painting in off-white overalls that held the rainbow in tiny teardrop splatters. I had resolved to finally start on the front parlor that day, but the pleasant weather was making me reconsider. Maybe I would ask permission to join the painting crew. The buckets with their liquid color practically sang to me whenever I went outside.
“Domingo, you mentioned that you helped your father when he was groundskeeper here.”
“That’s right. As soon as I was large enough not to be a nuisance, and, I suspect, rather before.” Domingo laughed, probably at some memory of his own ineptitude.
“Were you friendly with any of the women who worked in the house?”
“Oh, no. We were outdoor workers. That was made plain from the start. I don’t think I ever went farther than the kitchen door until I was given care of the place when my father retired.”
“Did your father?”
“Go inside?”
“Yes. I mean, that’s not the point. Did he make friends with any of the women who worked here?”
Domingo shrugged. “I don’t know. He has never mentioned it.”
I sighed, then cut myself another hunk of pecan roll. One thing about my steady physical labor around Phineas House: I wasn’t much worried about gaining weight.
“I told you I wanted to learn what happened to my mother. I thought one of the servants might know something she didn’t want to tell the police.”
Domingo might have a foolish attachment to Phineas House, but he was no fool when it came to anticipating what I was thinking.
“And you think they might not have wanted to tell the police?”
“My mother was a formidable woman,” I replied. “I think if she told someone something and said it shouldn’t be told to anyone, that secret would be kept—even from the police.”
“But now …” Domingo nodded. “I will ask my father. I was going to visit him and my mother tonight in any case. He’s interested in the progress on the House.”
“Tell him to come over if he wants,” I said. “I’ll give him a tour of what I’ve done.”
“I will tell him,” Domingo said.
The morning was showing promise of turning into a lovely day. Suddenly, I could not face another round of moving furniture, dusting, polishing, of the vacuum howling in my ears.
“Can you use another hand with the painting?”
Domingo grinned. “I have been making a bet w
ith myself on how long you would wait to ask—artist that you are. Come. I have just the place for you to start.”
What Domingo had reserved for me were leopards. There were three of them, bordering a lancet window on the ground floor that looked in upon the formal dining room. One leopard crouched at the top of the window, its tail hanging down, apparently without regard for the leopard stretching up from below with every intention of giving it a good swat. The upper leopard’s disregard could be understood, for its attention was fixed on the leopard beneath the windowsill, its long body elongating in a crouch so lifelike that it seemed impossible that it would not be completed.
“Wonderful!” I said. Then I frowned. “But I don’t remember it at all.”
“But, Mira,” Domingo said, “then there were houses on either side. These were framed by comparatively narrow side yards—I don’t think anyone but my father and myself ever came here, and then just to tend the roses that climbed the wall.”
“I remember them,” I said, “a glorious pale yellow. They only bloomed once a year. The rest of the time they were just a nice, dark green—unless bare in winter.”
“That’s right,” Domingo said, pleased. “Old roses. After the fire, I transplanted what I could save to one of the back walls. You will see them flower again in the spring.”
I returned my attention to the leopards. The area surrounding them had already been painted the dark green used elsewhere for the window frames. The leopards themselves had been primed, but waited for an exterior cover.
“Looks like this is ready to go.”
“All you need to do is select your colors,” Domingo agreed. “Come this way.”
I did, and a short time later returned carrying brushes, rags, and a tin of golden-yellow paint. Enrico, Domingo’s nephew, followed with the stepladder I would need to reach the upper portions of the frame. I thanked the boy absently, my mind already taken up with the challenge before me. Brush went into paint, and I lost myself to the demands of color.
Hours later, when Enrico returned to tell me the crew was breaking for lunch, it was probably a good thing I was standing on the ground, for I was so lost that I would have fallen off the stepladder if I’d been up there.
But the leopards were done, and they were magnificent. It must have been the relative dryness of the New Mexico weather, but the base coat of golden-yellow paint had dried almost as soon as I had it just the way I wanted it. I’d returned to the paint cans and poured a little brown into the yellow, blending it until I had what I needed for the touch of shadowing that would give dimension to the three figures.
I’d brought along a couple other shades of brown for the spots, a dip of red for the tongues in the open, playfully snarling mouths, a dab of white for the fangs and extended claws. What color to make the eyes had been a dilemma. Contrary to popular belief, the great cats don’t usually have green eyes. Most often their eyes are gold, similar in shade to their coats. I debated, and decided that here myth served better than reality. I’d been dabbing the last eye green and adding a white sparkle when Enrico had come for me.
The overall effect of my paint job was an extravaganza more usual on a carousel than on the side of a house. I couldn’t have been more delighted. The boy—he was about ten—grinned at me in equally enthusiastic appreciation.
“Wow!” he said. “Those are wonderful. Will you do the others, too?”
“Others?” I asked.
Enrico indicated the other three lancet windows that served the dining room. All were adorned with variations on the great-cat motif. There were lions, tigers, tassel-eared lynxes, ocelots, cougars, and other wild cats.
“I think I might,” I said. Then I felt the aches in my body from the long time I’d spent up on the stepladder. “But not today. I still have work to do inside.”
“The inside of the house is looking nice,” Enrico said, shyly. “I looked in the front door and some of the windows. When I was little, and would come to help Tio Domingo I thought the house was haunted because of all the white things. It is better now.”
“I think so, too,” I agreed.
Behind me, the soughing of the wind in the eaves sounded like the house’s own whispered agreement.
8
The fact is that Vegas is a small town and you are likely to run into the “characters” in a hamlet more frequently than you would in a metropolis. The small town “centrics” permit those of their citizenry who are farther off the beam to run around without let or hindrance.
—Milton C. Nahm,
Las Vegas and Uncle Joe
INSIDE THE LINES
Although I was now splitting my time between painting the great cats, and working on the front parlor, I did not give up my intention to pay some serious attention to my search for my mother.
Domingo’s father had not known anything about the women who had worked in Phineas House in my mother’s day. Like me, he had recalled them as always being there. No, they had not lived in the carriage house, nor had there been another building on the grounds. I began to think that at least one of the rooms I had dismissed as an unused guest room must have been servant’s quarters, and that any sign of its former inhabitants had been tidied away with the same meticulous attention that had left the kitchen free of grease and dirt.
Although this seemed to be a dead end, I still had several names. I was disappointed to learn that the chief of police who had put himself in charge of the investigation into my mother’s death, had himself died since.
“Forty years, Mira,” I said to my reflection one evening as I was scrubbing off the day’s accumulated grime. “See if you can find out who else was on the force then. See if any of them were close to the chief and would have assisted him.”
I bit into my thumbnail, uncertain how to do this. Then it occurred to me that the newspaper morgues might help. In a small town like this—like the one I’d grown up in—it was more usual for assisting officers to get some sort of credit. Thinking about the newspaper gave me insight into another avenue I might explore—the newspaper’s own reporters. As with the police chief, the older ones might be dead, but the younger ones could still be around.
There was another reason I liked the idea of talking to a reporter. It seemed much less likely that a reporter would have been feeding information to the mysterious trustees. After all, a reporter made his living and reputation by publicly sharing information. Sitting on the details of a hot story would be a lot less attractive.
With these resolutions in mind—and with the need to purchase more furniture polish, soap, glass cleaner, and half-a-dozen other items as good reason for leaving Phineas House, I told Domingo I was going shopping, and would probably be gone for a bit. The map Mrs. Morales had given me showed the location of the Carnegie Library. There I figured I could fill in the rest.
The library did have the Las Vegas Optic on file, and I picked a corner and delved into facsimiles of old newspapers. Intent as I was on my quest, I had to keep dragging myself back on course. There were so many fascinating bits of trivia, windows into a time and place about which I was coming to realize just how little I knew.
On the other hand, I had only been nine when my mother had vanished. How much would I have known—or if known—cared about local events? I’d barely cared when J.F.K. had been assassinated a couple years later. I knew it was a big deal, but mostly I enjoyed the holiday from school as a chance to play with friends and indulge in an orgy of painting.
My research paid off by giving me several names, both of police officers whose names seemed to show up on a regular basis in association with the police chief, and of a reporter who, after the first hue and cry of my mother’s disappearance had ended, seemed to be doing the majority of the follow-up reporting.
I had vague memories of the reporter at least. He’d been youngish, slim and wiry, with brushed-back brown hair. His left jacket pocket had always contained a small tin stocked with brightly colored hard candy. When I remembered him I again tasted
a particular raspberry flavor and felt the lumpy texture of the candy in my mouth, the slight ooze of the soft center when I broke through the outer shell.
Unlike many of those who had asked me questions over those troubling days, Mr. O’Reilly seemed genuinely to listen to my answers. He’d also been the one who had interviewed Mrs. Ramsbottom, my former tutor, and recorded her scathing assessments of Colette for posterity.
My heart beat rather erratically when I cross-referenced his name the local telephone directory and found it listed: Chilton O’Reilly. I wrote down the number and stared at it. Unlike Domingo, I didn’t have a cell phone, so I couldn’t follow my immediate impulse to make the call. By the time I got home and unloaded my supplies, I was so nervous that my hand shook when I picked up the phone and punched in the numbers.
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